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Ficcy Goodness
Well, ladies and gentlemen, I present you with my first ever finished and posted fanfic. Well, ficlet, really. It's short.

And spoilery! Spoilers for Order of the Phoenix! You have been warned! (I say who dies. You've really been warned.)



Harry Potter and related indicia are the property of JK Rowling, Bloomsbury, Scholastic, and Warner Brothers. However, growing apart from a sister is in the public domain. I’m still not sure if I’m grateful to my sister or upset with her for putting me in a position to sympathize with Petunia. I make no profit form this story.

Spoilers for Order of the Phoenix

Journal Entry, June 1996

Vernon muttered in his sleep and rolled over. Reassured he was sound asleep, Petunia switched on her bedside lamp and slid the drawer of her nightstand open. She pulled out a spiral notebook—just a cheap little thing from the supermarket—yanked the pen free, and, with the television as background noise, began to write.

I do not have to love Harry Potter.

I don’t have to accept the boy, or be kind to him, or treat him as though he were my own. And I never have, in the fourteen years he’s stayed with us. I resent him. I resent what he is.

What his mother was.

Tonight, though, the boy did something very strange—something I never would have expected.

After that horrible confrontation in the train station (I swear, if it weren’t for people asking questions about that bloody owl of his, we’d just leave him to his own devices to get home) he barely said a word to us all night. He waited until Vernon went upstairs to bed and Dudley went off to play on his computer—I think he was venting on those demons or aliens—and cornered me, alone, in the kitchen.

“Dumbledore’s told me why I have to stay here,” he said.

“What?” No, not witty, but it was what I said.

“I know you don’t want me, and it’s not as though I’ve had a happy childhood, really.” He swallowed, not meeting my eyes. “But I know why now. It doesn’t make it better, or make me like you any. But it matters.” He turned to look at me… with those eyes of his. “And I wanted to say thank you. For keeping me, at least.”

He’s really got Lily’s eyes. “Why this? Why now?”

“Why? Because now I know. Because when something should be said, you should say it. Because people should be told things—I saw my godfather die because people weren’t told things.” He ran a hand through that awful hair of his. “There’s another person I want to thank, and to apologize to—not for me, really, but because my father was a prat to him—but he’d never take it. Not from me. It’d make things worse, I think. You don’t have to accept it, either. But thank you anyway. For my life.”

“I don’t love you, Harry,” I said.

“I know.”

“I don’t even like you very much.”

He shrugged.

“I despise what you are.”

“That’s fair,” he said. “A lot of wizards despise what you are. It’s not right either way. But it’s fair.”

I knew some of them hated us. How could I not know? I heard about it often enough.

“But Lily was my sister,” I said. “You can’t know what that means. Even if you had a sister, you’d still be a brother. It’s not the same. But you’ve thanked me. I won’t say you’re welcome; you’re not. But you will have a… a home here until you’re of age or this mess you were born into finally ends. Do not thank Vernon. Do not mention this to Dudley. And do not ever, ever thank me again.”

Harry nodded, once. “I’ll just go to bed, then.”

“You do that.”

Oh, God, that boy cannot possibly know anything, anything at all about Lily or me or why I kept him here…

I was tempted, I was really tempted, to hand him over to the police, to never look into a pair of green eyes again, to forget the whole ruddy mess of witches and wizards and magic.

Only I’ve got green eyes, too.

Lily and I were close, once. Before she went to that horrible school and even after, for a while. We wrote each other every week, her telling me about charms and potions and friends with bizarre names, me chatting about the mundane things I’d done… I was jealous, yes. And I would’ve been even more jealous if Lily weren’t always so jealous of me. Hair dryers, movies, television, radio… the one thing Lily hated most about that school was the fact that, as she put it, the Industrial Revolution had passed them by.

Then she brought that horrible boy around. Potter.

Not Harry.

James.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if he weren’t so bloody irritating, or if he’d been a bit more… courteous, I suppose, to me, or if Mum and Dad hadn’t liked him so well, or if he hadn’t been so bloody much more handsome than Vernon.

Or if he hadn’t colored my hair purple for an hour.

Or if everyone else hadn’t found that so blasted funny.

Or Lily had stopped going out with him.

She and I had a great row one night. It started off so… trivially, but we got louder and crueler. Finally, I told her I hated Potter, I hated magic, and I hated her.

“I hate you.”

I moved out of our parents’ house and in with Vernon. We were married a year later. Lily didn’t come.

She and James Potter were married not long after that. Vernon and I were invited, but we didn’t go. Mum was upset with me about that.

Neither Lily nor I attended the other’s baby shower, nor our respective sons’ christenings, though Mum nicked invitations from both of us for the other.

We didn’t go to our nephews’ first birthday parties, either.

And then they were dead. My sister was dead, and her son was deposited on my doorstep like a newspaper, with a letter from some batty old wizard telling me Harry Potter could only truly safe with me, because of Lily’s blood and some silly prophecy.

I tried to throw the note out. I never did.

I was ready to give him away. I really was. I had a baby son of my own; how was I supposed to handle another? But he was squalling, and I was holding him and fuming, and I walked past a mirror…

My hair is blonde as corn; Lily’s was red as carrots. But the streetlights were orange, and all I could really see in the reflection was orange-lit hair and green eyes.

Just for a second, I looked like Lily.

And that was when it hit me.

My sister was dead. She and her awful husband had been killed by the magic I despised.

But my sister was dead.

My sister was dead, and the last words I’d said to her were “I hate you.”

And now I could never take them back.

I don’t have to love Harry Potter, or like him, or accept what he is.

But as much as I resented her, toward the end, I never really hated Lily.

I can’t change what I said.

I can’t say I’m sorry, either.

Harry Potter is alive. And he is… as welcome here as he ever was or can be. And I won’t let Vernon throw him out, not unless the boy wants to leave or this nonsense with Voldemort is over.

Harry Potter’s life is my apology to Lily.

And I won’t let him thank me for it.

Petunia closed the notebook, clipped the pen back to the spiral binding, put it away, and turned out the light.

She could sleep now.